Successful Wedding Ideas

If you are having a wedding with more than 80 guests and you are serving a buffet-style meal, here's a great Wedding Tip for you:

Make the lines go faster (and get to the rest of the items on your timeline) by asking your caterer or banquet manager to provide a double-sided buffet table. It will cut down on long lines snaking through the tables, get things moving along and will make everyone happy that they weren’t still sitting at their table starving.

Here's a Wedding Tip that you'll probably only hear from an experienced Wedding DJ, but it's super important:

When working with a banquet facility coordinator or simply putting together a wedding day layout in your backyard, here’s something to keep in mind: Location of the dance floor. Naturally, this isn’t something that a lot of people put great thought into, but as a DJ company, we do.

The best possible layout for us (and your guests) is to have the dance floor directly in front of where you want your DJ set up – ideally, with no guests behind the DJ…or directly in front of them. The reason for this is because as the wedding reception progresses, DJs use appropriate volume levels to build toward a dancing/festive atmosphere.

If the dance floor is set up away from the DJ with tables (i.e., guests) between the DJ and the dance floor, your DJ has to raise the volume that much more and will cause an uncomfortable atmosphere for those guests “caught in the middle”. Also affected are the dance lights. If a dance floor is far away, the DJ is not able to keep the dancing to a confined area.

If your dancing is restricted to the area in front of the DJ, your guests (especially older guests) are able to sit on the outskirts and hold a conversation with each other without blaring music or dance lights in their eyes.

This Wedding Tip is crucial for making your wedding day run smoothly and to make sure no one misses out on the fun:

If possible, have your bar or drinks table in the same room as the dance floor. Guests tend to congregate around spirits and if it is in a different room (or even a different floor!), it will be difficult to let your guests know when things are happening (cake cutting, first dance, etc.), making them miss important events at your wedding.

Trust us, we've seen wedding receptions where the bar is on the other side of the building and everyone congregates. It has prematurely ended many receptions.

A Wedding Planning Tip that could set your mind at ease:

Depending on where you are having your wedding and/or reception, you may already have a coordinator working your wedding (banquet manager, etc.). If not, consider hiring someone (preferably not a friend or family member) to at least oversee the ceremony and the big parts of your wedding reception such as dinner, first dance, father-daughter dance, toasts, announcements, etc.

While your Wedding DJ should certainly help in this area, the ceremony will run smoother if there is a “point person” who can be with the bridal party and cue the DJ, etc.

This Wedding Tip is a more modern one that many brides and grooms use today:

Have a fancy small cake for the bride and groom (for the cake cutting) and then have cheaper (not less tasty) sheet cakes already cut and ready to serve in the back for your guests. This makes the cake easy to transport and – in some cases – save you hundreds of dollars in the process. Different flavors of Cupcakes and/or Cake Pops are also popular.

This Wedding Planning Tip can help you make sure the memories of your day are captured:

You can’t get the time back after your wedding to take photos/poses you WISHED you had taken on your wedding day. Many family members will only be in town a short time as it is. Make a checklist of family members you want photos with, bridal party poses, photos with young guests, etc. for your photographer (it gets crazy and your photographer will appreciate it as well).

If you have specific poses (Pinterest!) that you’d like your photographer to shoot, make sure you get the list of the specifics (example pics are incredibly helpful) to your photographer ahead of your wedding date so that they can bring proper equipment and/or staff to make your photo dreams come true.

This is a Wedding Tip that you'll only hear about from professional and experienced wedding vendors, but it helps you out too:

Many people plan on feeding their vendors during the reception, but don’t know to designate a table for them to eat at. The best is to have the facility set up a vendor table that is not among the guest tables (if possible) so that the vendors have utensils, napkins, drinks, etc. and can come and go as they continue working.

Also: Vendors tend to have “down time” during dinner and serving them FIRST (after the bridal party and immediate family, of course) is a good idea since they are the first needing to be ready after everyone has eaten. Vendors really appreciate this thoughtfulness and it’s always good to have happy, fed vendors ready to go when your guests are, rather than hurrying to get a few bites of food down because they have to get back to work.

This Wedding Tip is brought to you by all of the seniors from weddings where they lost even more of their hearing:

We realize that some situations (smaller venues) this tip may not be as easy to abide by, but at least you will be aware of this issue and take whatever precautions you decide.

All wedding venues are different, naturally. Longer banquet rooms may require your DJ to have the volume at a higher level (even during dinner) than would be in a room that is more controllable with sound. Even in those venues, we recommend that you not place guests directly in front of or immediately to either side of where the DJ will be set up – especially older guests.

The reason for this is that if there are guests sitting directly underneath (or very near) the speakers, the volume may be a bit too much for them to converse. Even 6 to 8 feet away will diminish this volume as we place our speakers up on speaker stands, but in the immediate vicinity it is loud.

Give us a call to discuss this. We can help you to design a layout that creates the optimal setup for your event..